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- Budget season, removal of the Forrest remains, and much more tonight on Behind the Headlines.

[intense orchestral music] - I'm Eric Barnes with The Daily Memphian.

And thanks for joining us.

I'm joined this week by a roundtable of journalists starting with Toby Sells, news editor from the Memphis Flyer.

Toby, thanks for being here.

- Thanks for having me Eric.

- Omer Yusuf is a reporter with The Daily Memphian.

Omer, thanks for being here.

- Thanks for having me, Eric.

- And Bill Dries is also a reporter with The Daily Memphian.

We'll talk through you mentioned a number of things at the top.

The removal of the Nathan Bedford Forrest remains, the budget and maybe an update on the bridge.

Omer has been doing a bunch of interesting work on redevelopments and Frayser, the pipeline.

There's a lot of things going on.

Let's start Bill though, with probably, I guess I don't know if it's the newsiest thing but the budgets we over the last couple of weeks have had the City Council budget chair on we've talked to what the the county folks about the budget.

It is a strange year and a surprising year in my many years in Memphis where tax rates potentially are going down and potentially going down substantially.

There's also a lot of confusion about where the federal money that is flowing through to the city and county.

Exactly what can and can't be done with that.

I don't think anybody's complaining about it but the rules are still not clear.

Maybe we start with what you want with the county?

Which we'll be voting on Monday.

It, it looks like.

- Yeah.

It looks like the county is going to be the first to close the budget season.

Although I think things are changing as we speak.

This has gone from probably a more stable situation when the budget hearings began to a lot of changes toward the end here for it.

And as you mentioned, a lot of the uncertainty deals with some new guidance that the city and the county got on how to use the federal ARPA funds, American Rescue Plan Act funds that are, in the case of Shelby County, that's $180 million from the federal government, and the case of the city, it's $160 million from the federal government.

And each of those governments have now received their their first of two payments of that.

But the guidance changed on May 10th and it has basically punched a $23 million hole in the city's budget, the county, not so much but there probably won't be the final word on how to use the money and what revenues you can make up and how the calculations are done until mid-July in Washington.

- And we're looking at tax rate proposals, given that it's a reappraisal year and you know, the the the tax rate can't move to create a windfall the City Council or the County Commission they can vote to increase taxes, but as it is right now it looks like the city tax rate will drop from 3.19 to 2.71.

County will drop from 4.05 to 3.45, give or take.

- That is, those are the tax rates that produce the same amount of revenue for city and county government respectively taking into account the 2021 reappraisal of property.

Neither County Mayor Lee Harris nor City Mayor Jim Strickland have proposed a tax increase.

However, there are some discussions on the county and city side about about possibly a tax hike, which we which can be done but it has to be proposed and voted on separately once the tax rate is reset.

At this point, it doesn't appear that raising taxes beyond that re-certified amount has the seven votes necessary to pass on either the city or the county side but there has been some discussion about that.

And the discussion has centered on in the case of the county raising the taxes but keeping it below the $4 mark and on the city side it's about keeping it below the $3 mark.

- It is interesting.

I'll go to you Toby.

But one thing, I, two municipalities are looking at raising taxes, Bartlett and Collierville.

Bartlett is looking at a 15 cent increase after the reappraisal adjustment Bartlett 24 cent increase which is totally counter to how it was, maybe I'm old but you know, 10, 15, 20 years ago when the, the municipalities kept their taxes very low and very stable.

And the city and county seem to constantly be raising them.

We'll have the mayors of Collierville and Bartlett on in two weeks to talk about their budgets school systems and all that stuff.

But Toby, what did you want to add?

- It was just interesting this year that there was kind of a new voice in budget season.

I've covered a lot of budgets over the years, but this year the Moral Budget Coalition I wrote about and I know Bill wrote about it.

It's this group of groups, including MICA out there Memphis Tenant's Unit, Stand for Children Tennessee and a lot of others out there, BLDG Memphis.

And they wanted to have the city and the county to keep the tax rate as it is right now, which would create, as they said it would create $40 million in the city and then $100 million for the county.

And they wanted this money invested in the community which is uh, you know, what you will remember from the Black Lives Matter of, of last summer you know, when, when activists would say "defund the police" they didn't mean we don't like the police.

They said, you know, let's, you know reduce the money that we spend on police and, and put it into the community and this, and, and what they want for you know, affordable housing services for the homeless, mental health education, a raft of these things that this group is pushing for.

So at this stage, in, in the, in the budget game it doesn't seem likely that they would go back to the you know, to the tax rate that we have right now.

But it's an interesting new voice that that arose during budget season.

Like I said, I've covered a lot of these, not as closely in years past, but it's interesting to see kind of a new voice wanting to have a seat at the table during budget talks.

- Yeah, we had Cordell Oren from Stand for Children and Deveney Perry from BLDG Memphis on last week to talk about them, their advocacy for keeping the tax rate the same as it is now and seeing a pretty significant windfall in taxes, windfall or tax increase.

However you want to look at it and do those investments.

Omer, you want to weigh in on any parts of this and, and where things stand.

- Well, I cover Bartlett, so I can give some insight on the tax rate discussion on over there.

So, the 24 cent tax hike is for 3 reasons.

One, they want to maintain the city's service levels.

Another is they're proposing 4% increase for employees and they also have to pay some debt service.

So they kind of think that they're at this point now, where if they don't do it now, they're gonna have to do it later and the cost may be much bigger.

So that's kind of why alderman, Mayor McDonald are kind of discussing this right now.

And there is a final vote scheduled for June 8th of next week.

So we'll see how that goes.

- Right.

Bill, anything else on budget or we'll shift gears.

Where, where do we go next?

- The City Council will try to close out its budget season at their June 15th meeting.

They were originally going to have that vote scheduled for, for this week, this fiscal year for city and county and all six of the suburban governments starts on July 1st.

There are usually some line items that are moved around within the budget, by the process, by the County Commission and the City Council.

And this year is certainly no exception to that.

- Bill, over on the City Council side.

You know, when I used to cover this stuff, gavel to gavel this was a really tense, contentious time of the year right here at the end of budget season.

I remember the council meetings going to, you know midnight, one in the morning, are they still like that did they, are they still like that anymore?

- So far not.

Fingers crossed, you know, on that, but the County Commission did have about a seven-hour discussion on this, on this yesterday.

You know, some of that is that the Council has just started meeting in person again.

So, so there's that kind of factor into it.

Overall, the discussions have been pretty amiable.

No one's gotten really frustrated by it on on either side, city or county but these are, even under the best circumstances, budget season is a complex undertaking.

How much is one cent on the tax rate worth?

Even on the county side, they were not allowed to go to three digits on the tax rate.

In other words, they wanted to do explore a basic tax rate of $3.45.

Three point four five one as the tax rate.

Well, the state said you can't do that.

You have to round down in this case because it's 1/100th or something like that of a penny.

Yeah.

- As a last question, you, Omer, has it been contentious in Bartlett or is it, as the board and the mayor, have they all been pretty, you know aligned in terms of that, the direction of the conversation?

- Well, on the first two readings it's been 6-0 both times on both the tax rate and the budget.

If there is this common understanding that something does have to be done now.

So if there is going to be any pushback that June 8th meeting ahead of the July 1 deadline will be the most likely time you'd see anything.

But the early indications seemed to be that this will pass either by 6-0 or 5-1 vote.

- Let me move on to the, the the remains of Nathan Bedford Forrest, obviously what some years ago now the statue itself was removed from Health Sciences Park, but the pedestal and then the remains underneath that had to still have been in limbo for quite a few years now.

The process of removing those remains started this week.

Bill, you were there, it was a strange process.

It was a very ugly scene.

We have some video that we'll show in a bit here.

Tell us what you saw and we'll talk about it.

And we'll take a look at that video in a bit.

- Well, I made two trips to Health Sciences Park that day.

The first was when we heard that that the parts of the pedestal were being dismantled and there was a crane in the park.

So I went over and talked to Van Turner, who's the head of Memphis Green Space, the private nonprofit that owns the park and had the equestrian monument removed, as well as Lee Miller of Sons of Confederate Veterans, who was overseeing the removal of the statue and the disinterment of the remains of Nathan Bedford Forrest, and his wife all of this to be moved to a new Confederate park in Columbia, Tennessee.

And at that point, it was pretty much how do you do this?

What do you know?

Why are there bricks at the center of the pedestal?

Because, you know, no ones, there are no there are no drawings or or plans for how the grave site was erected.

And the monument was erected more than 100 years ago.

So it was that kind of an angle.

Then pictures started popping up on social media of some Confederate flags and the chain link fence that is around the monument.

So I went back over, Commissioner Tammy Sawyer, Shelby County Commissioner Tammy Sawyer who led the Take 'Em Down 901 movement which along with the city's moves in court were, were the two factors that surrounded the removal of of the monument.

And there was a really tense and ugly confrontation and threats made towards Sawyer by one of the workers who who was there working on the, on the monument.

So Patrick Lantrip, our photographer shot some video of kind of the height of the confrontation.

[man singing] - He's going to stand behind me and sing Dixie Land.

And I just told y'all that my ancestors picked cotton.

I'm not making this up.

I have slave records, my ancestors picked cotton.

While his ancestors beat and raped my ancestors.

[man singing Dixie's Land] ♪ Away in Dixie Land I'll take my stand ♪ - But guess what?

Dixie is dead, and it was killed by the descendants of black people.

The descendants of black people.

Van Turner and Tammy Sawyer and others, we took your hero down.

- It is ugly and, and really not good to watch.

Toby your your thoughts on it.

You watched it when it was first posted.

We've seen it again now.

- And read Bill's story.

And it's unbelievable that somebody at a public site like that can so publicly attack a public official like that, you know, to be so emboldened.

I think that really shows how emboldened these people still are.

You know, we think that that maybe they have kind of gone back into wherever they were before the election and all that, but, you know the Southern Poverty Law Center just came out with a report that Memphis is home to more hate groups in any city in Tennessee, you know and two of those are white nationalists, one is Neo-Confederate, and these people are still embolden to go out and to say things like that with a bank of television cameras going I think it shows how emboldened they are.

I think it also shows just how not desperate we are but how ready we are to have this monument completely gone that, that we would subject ourselves to this over and over and over again, to get this gone into and to kind of turn the page on this chapter.

And I hope that I'm just really glad that it's happening and hopefully it'll be over soon and we won't have to deal with ugly situations like we had in the park the other day.

- Omer, your thoughts, your thoughts on where the park goes from here?

- Well, um So, Juneteenth, which is coming up in a couple of weeks, Lisa Franklin and Van Turner with Memphis Green Space announced several weeks ago that the annual Juneteenth celebration will take place at Health Sciences Park.

And the reason that they're moving it from Robert R. Church Park to Health Sciences Park is part of that symbolization that this is our space now.

That we're going to start this next chapter.

And that won't be a place where specifically black Memphians don't have to worry about the fear, any more that they can be welcomed here, that they can have joy here, that they can celebrate here.

And I think that'll be a really important moment in obviously the past few years.

And then it's all building up to this and hopefully that first step in really making that next chapter start.

- And, and just some logistics Bill it's going to take them a couple of weeks, is that right, to disassemble and so on?

- Right.

It's going to take a couple of weeks, the, the panels on the side of the pedestal were removed for restoration and some repair work as a part of this.

The remains of Forrest and his wife, as we said, are about 10 feet below everything.

So this is going to take some time to work out logistically.

There is actually an archeologist that is working with the group on this during the removal.

So on the one hand, you have a story that really remains about the divisions in our, in our society and and the resistance to, to change and the whole fake history of the Confederacy that began after the Civil War and and that some people want to preserve to this to this very day.

And then you have the story about, well, how do you go about something like this, no matter who the individual is.

- And, and again, I think you alluded to this and it was in your story but this was being paid for by, whom?

- The Sons of Confederate Veterans and the Forrest family.

There's no public funding that is involved in this.

And that's easy to forget because this was once a city park up until 2017.

It is now land that is owned for public use by Memphis Green Space as is the other park where there was a statue of Jefferson Davis which is now Fourth Bluff or Memphis Park.

- Yeah.

Let's switch to Frayser.

And some of the stories you've been doing up there, Omer, it's another part of your beat.

And there's some big investments that have happened.

I mean, hundreds of millions of dollars in investments.

If you go back to Nike expanding its distribution center, Amazon.

Talk about a bit about what you've been writing about up there.

- So you've kind of got these three buckets I'll start off with the big ones.

When we, of course you had Nike a few years ago.

Now Amazon has invested more than $200 million in both a fulfillment center and a delivery station.

You had Ampro recently add another $30 million into its Frayser business which is a hair manufacturer company.

And it's a really important step in creating hundreds and hundreds of more jobs for people in Frayser.

And they're actively trying to recruit people in Frayser to go work there.

And on the other hand you also have the City of Memphis investing in a new Ed Rice Community Center and Frayser Library and then renovating Rodney Baber Park.

And those are really crucial because those are things that people in the community really value and that value them for a really long time.

But they're also spaces that have been there, because they've been there for a really long time, they're due for an upgrade.

And they're also quite excited about that.

And then you have this final part, which is the investment coming more or less from the outside.

You have early it's that it's investing 12 million $12 million in a new early childhood education facility.

And then you have Renaissance at Steele Apartment complex which is a $17 million renovation.

So they talk about employment.

And you're talking about business expansion and talking about housing and education, all these things in that in a neighborhood that had gone through years of disinvestment and it's really creating some optimism in Frayser now.

- One interesting thing I thought about it was, you know, we've debated on had people on the show, debating low wage jobs.

Obviously the Flyer has written about, Daily Memphian, others, you know, that, that we Martavius Jones is a big advocate of City Councilman that we, you need to be not pursuing these lower wage jobs.

The Amazon jobs are start at $15 an hour.

I can't remember what the Ampro ones are but you did speak to a community leader up in, in in Frayser who said, this is fantastic.

These are jobs.

This is, these are people here in Frayser who can be employed.

And this is, I think he said our prayers have been answered.

- Yes.

I spoke to Pursuit of God Church Pastor Ricky Floyd.

And if you talk to a lot of the community leaders in Frayser they're just excited to have jobs that, start at $15 an hour.

Are they the ideal jobs that'll transform Frayser right away, not necessarily.

But it's a step in the right direction.

And if you talk to them, that's how they view this.

They don't view this as an overnight transformation but they do these first steps as crucial to getting this neighborhood back on its feet that's got an estimated population of about 50,000 people.

So we're talking about one of Memphis' largest black neighborhoods, and it's important that it gets back on its feet.

- I think this was simultaneous with, I'm gonna put you on the spot Bill.

We have Accelerate Memphis, which is this $200 million kind of, it's a debt restructuring plan with the city that they can take $200 million and put it towards capital improvement projects across the city.

I think Frayser, there are areas all across the city very much follows the Memphis 3.0 map and the strategic plan that which includes Frayser.

And then also this week, the Office of Planning and Development, I believe it was, started talking about this three to five-year plan to expand broadband to underserved areas, which includes Frayser in terms of its access to broadband.

So thoughts on that and you're, you're from Frayser, right?

Didn't you, you went to school in Frayser?

- I went to school.

Alumni of Westside High School.

Lived there.

Grew up there.

Yeah, the broadband plan is actually the Division of Planning and Development, as well as Housing and Community Development for the city.

And it's based in part on the Memphis 3.0 plan and specifically the, the centers or, or the "anchors" as they're called in the plan, that are in areas where there is low access to to broadband and digital access there.

And that's where this is going to start.

There's a, there's a PILOT in Soulsville as well.

And they're going to proceed with some funding here to map out likely spots for the spread of that access.

And of course we've seen how important that is during the pandemic that we've just been through.

- I'm going to skip over one of the biggest stories going on right now is the bridge and the repairs to the bridge.

And we've, 'cause we've got Pete Buttigieg, The Department of Transportation Secretary is in town as we're taping this, may have some announcements today.

So if we talk too much about it, it could be off-track.

But one, I mean, there are a couple of big questions I guess I'll do a couple of minutes on this Bill.

What do we expect from Pete Buttigieg?

And again, I'm putting you in this bad place where we're taping before he speaks and what comes next with the bridge, real briefly.

- Well, what comes next is how long is this going to take to get the bridge reopened to traffic?

But beyond that, there are some larger discussions.

This has revived discussion of the possibility of a third vehicular traffic bridge across the Mississippi River at Memphis which the last serious discussion of this was about 20 years ago that shows you what kind of the timeframe is for that.

What we're expecting out of Secretary Buttigieg's visit to Memphis is probably a lively discussion at the forum at FedEx which will feature Republican U.S.

Senator Marsha Blackburn among the people involved in that discussion.

And she's been highly critical of the administration's infrastructure plan as not being about roads and bridges enough.

And of course, the secretary will be here flying the banner of the Biden administration and promoting that still forming infrastructure plan.

- I still think also now when I move to Toby for some other things, but that one of the big unanswered questions, I know the inspector from Arkansas who had inspected the bridge and missed this that from, it looks like potentially a couple of years was fired, but what happens next with bridge inspections?

How did the whole, maybe it was that person's fault, but that person had bosses and and a whole structure that allowed a, not a crack but a massive fissure to go unnoticed for so long that those are the next questions that need to be answered.

But, but Toby, I wanted to switch to you if we could.

'Cause you've got a big story coming up in The Flyer about the legislative session and some of the workings there.

- That's right.

And as I was watching the session, this year, I started to kind of notice a theme in a lot of the GOP actions up there.

Not all bills necessarily but that were happening separately.

But then when you take them together, you kind of see this theme emerge, that they were really aimed at poor people, at low-income people.

And in three big moves there were cuts to the state unemployment benefits which will take it, you know basically cut the time that we have for those in half.

And that doesn't start until 2023.

I'll talk about that in a minute.

But the second thing was Bill Lee's decision to cut the federal unemployment benefit from September to July and those are kind of taken together.

But then the third one was, you know the failure once again to expand Medicaid.

And I know we kind of talked about this, you know newspaper reporters have talked about this all session but when you bring them together, you do kind of see this theme of, of who these bills are aimed at.

And so I asked some insiders up there to see, you know, is this, is this some kind of concerted effort, right?

To prove some kind of Republican economic theory about you know, the work ethic of people or not.

And that person said it is not, only because the Republican Party at the State Capitol, they're just not that organized.

A lot of them, the insider told me, that they see the job as kind of a social hour.

They go along with whatever the speaker says.

So as far as there being some kind of big organized movement against, you know low-income people, he said that it just wasn't there but a lot of the rhetoric you see around unemployment benefits especially the state's unemployment benefits the rhetoric there, you see one legislator called these checks that unemployment checks giveaway money.

Another one said that, you know, we need to stop this money so we can get people out into the workplace, the work marketplace out there.

So you see that time and again, where these people they blame the people that are on unemployment.

And they think that they're just kind of being lazy and sitting around the house.

And as long as they're getting these checks they're not going out and getting these jobs.

And for them, that's kind of where, where their real heart is.

I think they're seeing these businesses that can't find enough workers right now.

And I don't think anybody really has their finger on why the shortage is right now, not even the Federal Reserve chairman knows exactly what to, how to how to put his finger on that.

But a lot of the Republicans when they're talking about this, they talk in anecdotes.

They say, well, there's a restaurant in my district that can't find workers.

There's another guy with a trucking company that says I've got, you know fifty trucks idled because I can't find drivers but they never point to, you know a study done by somebody that says here's what's going on.

And here's what it is.

- Let me, I apologize.

'Cause we're going to run out of time here Toby but I think it is an interesting debate.

I mean, if you go to the, you know, what the, the pages of the Wall Street Journal or if you turn on CNBC, that's very much, and we've spoken to people in Daily Memphian who are unable to hire people and blame the extended unemployment benefits.

And we are in the middle of a grand national experiment that we'll probably see six months, a year from now what held things back and what didn't.

I want to take one quick moment as we wrap up to say, this is thankfully, thankfully the last show that we will be doing from, by Zoom.

I am sick of looking at myself.

I'm sick of looking at the background of my apartment.

I want to thank everybody at KNO for making this work.

We did 50 or 60 shows by Zoom.

With case rates coming down we'll be back in the studio next week in person, and we really look forward to that.

I want to thank Natalie van Gundy, our producer, and a huge shout-out to Peter Richards, our director who managed this situation with a tremendous, without annoyance and, and pretty seamlessly.

We had very few problems.

And so a big thanks to him and others.

A last note, as we leave my apartment that this painting over my right shoulder, it's actually my, yeah my right shoulder.

I recently wrote a column about my mother recently passing.

A lot of viewers and readers were very kind to reach out.

And I don't know, they call it it spoke to them in some way.

And I really appreciate that.

I wrote about my mother's paintings and I wrote about two of her paintings specifically.

And that one right there is one of those.

So thank you.

I want to say to everyone who did reach out, y'all are very, very kind.

But that is all the time we have this week.

You can, as of course, as always get past episodes of the show at wkno.org or the full podcast of the show on The Daily Memphian site or wherever you get your podcasts.

And we will see you next week from the studio.

[intense orchestral music] [acoustic guitar chords]